Published 10 September 2008, doi:10.1136/bmj.a1602
Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1602

News

Vatican newspaper reopens debate on defining death

Michael Day

1 Milan

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

A front page editorial in the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, has reopened the debate on what constitutes the end of life, 40 years after the widely accepted Harvard report that established the concept of brain death.

The editorial, in the 2 September edition, declares that life might continue after the brain dies. It says that the current, almost universally accepted definition published by Harvard doctors in 1968 "is in contradiction to the concept of the person according to Catholic doctrine." Before the influential US report was published, death was defined by the absence of a heart beat and breathing.

The change brought by the Harvard report (JAMA 1968;205:337-40) enabled the church to sanction the switching off of life support machines. However, the key beneficiary of the definition of the end of life as brain death, the newspaper article says, has been organ transplantation. It notes, too, that the . . . [Full text of this article]


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